Dear K, Part 2 of Many

Dear K,

I felt you near me tonight. I could tell it was you because of the sudden warmth on my skin, like the way you used to come up behind me and wrap your arms around me. The way your presence enveloped mine, and how you were slightly, perfectly taller than me. And I could very nearly smell you, and there was a smile there for a moment carried by a memory: us in Whole Foods, smelling all the natural deodorants until we found the perfect one (because you were so careful with what you put on and in your body). You know I have been in Whole Foods exactly once since you died? And how I still hate those words that go stabbing through me every time I write them? And that my disbelief still roars so loud I rush to cover my ears before I realize it's all coming from inside me?

Oh Lovey, it's been weeks since you have visited me. Why is that? I imagine because it has to be, because there are some great laws of God or metaphysics or the universe (we still aren't on speaking terms, the universe and I) governing all of this in something like a pattern. Something like reason and sensibleness.  I imagine it's because I have to figure out some way to  go on, and how can I go on if all I'm doing is holding on? You had this thing for honesty and integrity so let me tell you true: my mind is rarely on anything but you. All day, every day. All the things I want to tell you. All the things you would find funny or ridiculous or sad. All the times I want to ask you a legal question because I was so impressed at all the knowledge you had from law school. Simple things. Artifacts of our life.

I like to imagine you would be touched by all the things I've written. You were always my primary subject, all the little poems that popped into my head during the day because of how I loved you. How you loved me. The time I stood up in an nearly empty basement in the Student Union and recited the slam poem I wrote for you, about how you were my Adonis and how beautiful you are. How beautiful you were. You are. Past tense is wrong. I don't care. I don't care if I can't hold your hand or kiss you or see your eyes or wear your hats. I don't care if the only way I can hear your voice is an accidental voicemail not even meant for me, or if I'll never get to buy you shoes or hats again. I don't care about any of that because you are not past tense to me. You are here. I feel you and you are here.

I didn't set out for this to be sad. I didn't set out to be crying yet again, or to have my heart to be humming with the way a bird trying to break a cage might. I just wanted to write you a letter because I felt you and I wanted to say hello. Just that simple thing so many take for granted. Hi. Hello. How are you? I still love you. And so I'll sign off with a little missing poem for you, that you might see these words in whatever way you see things now and hold them with you where ever you are.

I'm remembering all the little ways you loved me tonight.
I'm remembering things easy simple,
the smells and soundtracks of our lives,
the imprint of your person on my couch from years
of existing right along side me,
the way you used to flick my fingernails--
drove me crazy but felt like some tangible part of me for you,
before you realized that you had all of me--
and how hard was never nearly hard when you made me laugh,
and when didn't you make me laugh?
and things that are so tiny they aren't even memories
but shy glimmers and shadowy sparks,
and how I never knew I was beautiful
until I was beautiful in your eyes,
and all the ways you made me feel fearless.
All these tiny things I hold now,
and offer back up to keep you
warm and comforted in forever.

Always,

Your Leppy


Music: Ed Sheeran – Give Me Love

The Scratchiest Broken Record Alive

An apology for last night: I couldn't find my words, couldn't get my feet back under me. I wrote it after walking home from a good weekend with a friend, after talking to K's parents because it was Easter and it's been longer than it should be since I called them last, after passing under the Williamsburg Bridge with tears streaming down behind my new sunglasses, after sharing with K's mom the fact that I have his voice on a voicemail in my phone, after thinking about how sad it makes me that I have so much of the man he was and they only have memories of the child. So much After.

And I felt lost again friends, in this new place and new world I am in. I felt dizzyed up in confusion and eagerly afraid all together at once. I felt my heart and lungs and stomach contracting into themselves, dehydrating from this pain that I can hardly describe let alone touch or treat or heal. And I was thinking about how these themes are so damn reoccurring. The lost and lonely. The isolation. The confusion about how I am here and why and what to do. Always what to do with nothing to do at all. I feel like a broken record. I feel like the scratchiest fucking broken record in the world. Sometimes I wonder if these words are nails on a chalkboard to you. It's so easy for friends to forget the place I am in. It's so easy for them to treat me like the Sara they used to know. And I feel bad for them but worse for me, because I can't just remind them all the time, and sometimes I have to play along and it hurts. It fucking hurts to pretend that hard. Who knew Grief had so many kinds of pain? Who knew there were this many ways to feel sick?

I'm feeling vintage tonight. I feel older than I should again, like I'm posted up on someone's shelf, once loved now left behind. I feel dusty and dry, bitterish like tannins and tightened up like a short finish. It's important to write this all down I think, how I feel when I'm feeling at all. I don't think people really get what it's like not to feel because who does that, truly? Psychos and Socios who are out torturing animals before they work up the nerve to try it on a human? That's not me. But truly, I feel nothing. People say they're dead inside, but I wonder if that's just the numbness talking. My nothing is more like absent, some indeterminate hiatus from this plane of being. I guess the fact that I don't know how to get anyone to understand is why I keep trying. And that fact that people say all this is helping them. I can't begin to guess why or how me rambling on about how angry or sad or frustrated I am is helpful to anyone else, but so be it. I don't question anything anymore.

So let's see...how about some lessons making themselves recursive as of recent? I learn so much these days, like not seeking action where there is none. Like letting us be as still as we want without telling us to be gentle with ourselves (that's a repeat from last night, but it's my current source of irksomeness) or to feel the feelings we are trying to find again. It doesn't matter if it's anger or depression or joy, anything that will make us something like tangible and here and accounted for is welcomed. And knowing the only wrong thing to say is to say nothing at all, because then we don't know if you're uncomfortable or uncaring due to the equilibrium of our social queues being off, understandably. That just being with us is so important, that no matter how okay or normal we seem, or how little or much we cry we are still going through something horrible. How important it is to know and remember and do the best as best can be with any of us at all, the way we are so tiresome in our sadness. And the thing is, we know this. But it is not to be helped for some time. And that just sucks.

And realizing the converse of all that is all the people who want us to listen. Maybe because we've become so still, we seem like a receptacle for other people's stories/problems/existence? Maybe because we are empty, others desire to fill us up, selfishly or not, I don't know. And no matter how we react or don't, we are not ungrateful. We are incapable. It's different, you see, because it is surviving, or maybe living once in a while if the day is especially bright. So here I am, your favorite broken record played on repeat. But it bears repeating. It bears trying to fill in our gaps and blanks, understanding and compassion that cannot be returned just now, and so many other things. Just being with us in time and space, grounding us back to this earth and this reality. Keeping us here because the locale we desire is (must be, so important) unobtainable to us. Because holy fuck we just can't believe this our life, and how are we still breathing or existing at all? Don't talk about strength or anything else. We aren't strong, we are just here. We just exist and that is not strength but a bar set low for living, and that is okay. It's okay to not be encouraged or uplifted. It's okay to just be.

I spend a lot of time figuring out what is okay. I hope you haven't minded so much that I decided to share.

Love.

When I Slip

It's funny the way music works, how a simple melody or someone's voice can catapult us into an emotional extreme. And maybe the lyrics don't quite match up with how you're feeling, but somehow they still do. Today I was having brunch with a new friend and this song came on: Miike Snow – Animal  and it's not new and I've heard it before, but then the chorus hits and I hear

I change shapes just to hide in this place
But I'm still, I'm still an animal
Nobody knows it but me when I slip
Yeah I slip, I'm still an animal

and it's got me thinking about slipping. And what happens when we slip back towards darkness and low points and things that are scarier than they should be. These past few weeks have been hard for me, and I've been worried that I'm coming out of some sort of shock I didn't know I was experiencing (not that I think I'm fine, but just that I've been moving along in some capacity). I'm feeling a little at a loss for words tonight, but my heart is aching hard and I feel like writing something, anything at all, might ease my pain. So that's a disclaimer against what may end up as a stream of consciousness.

K's Law School is throwing a fundraiser for him this week. He used to wear brightly colored socks--amongst other sartorial choices that I always liked--and so they're asking everyone to wear bright socks on Tuesday to raise funds for a scholarship. So maybe if you think of it, and you own some bright socks, wear them on Tuesday and think of K, even if you didn't know him. 

So let's talk about that. Knowing K. Because many people thought they did, and they didn't. He was intensely private, although kind and attentive and a good listener. He was guarded about himself and his goals and his life. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who really knew him at this stage in his life, because he told me things he didn't tell anyone else. The way you get so comfortable with someone you don't sugar coat, you can just be candid and honest and open and know they get it. Even when I didn't get it, I got it because I got him and how he saw the world. I was lucky to have known him like that, to be trusted so much by someone who didn't trust very easily at all. 

I'm feeling lost. None of this is helping my heartache tonight, but I still want to write it. Sometimes I just want to talk about K for hours and move in and out of crying and memories. I want to show whoever is listening pictures and tell them stories. I want to play the single voicemail I have so they can hear his voice and try to create an image of the whole person I knew.  And I don't want them to say anything. I don't want to be told it will be okay eventually, or to see a therapist, or to be gentle with myself, or to let myself feel the anger and sadness. I appreciate it, the kindness and the good intent, but I don't want to hear it anymore. I just want to be able to talk forever about someone who doesn't exist anymore. And how fucked up it is that it's so easy to stop existing (yes he's still with me, etc etc didn't we just talk about not saying those things anymore?) and how unfair.

My heart is too heavy to write the way I want, or say the things I want to say. So I'm just going to stop. Sometimes I wish time and world and everything would just stop. Sometimes I wish I didn't bounce between extremes and confusion and feelings of nothings and everythings. I wish I wasn't vulnerable and that I didn't trust so easily. I wish I was more like K, who was good at so very many things that I am not good at...and I am good at things he wasn't good at---that's why we worked so well. 

I just really, really miss him right now. I want the person who completed me to be here to hold me. He is the only person who I want to tell me it will be alright. He is the only person I want to make me laugh, or to keep me company so I don't feel lonely. He is the only person who could truly keep me from feeling lost. Good night friends, in all this confusion and odd ramblings of tonight. The next one will be more coherent. The next one will have a point. I think I said inspirational on Facebook? The next one will be...something. Hopefully inspired. Hopefully better.

Order of Operations

I think lately I've been trying to find my voice again. My poetry, my cadence, my prose. Everyone who has read my blog and has said I should write a book, thank you. I appreciate that. This post though, it isn't like that. It's not trying to describe my feelings. It's memories. And memories are often ugly. No apologies, just facts. So let me give you the first memory from After:

8am, give or take. Cold, although the heat's always on too high in my apartment. There is fuzziness, confusion. Everything wavy and slightly surreal. It's too early; I haven't slept much and my head is pounding like it knows we're not sleeping again for months. Maybe ever. I try to put my contacts in, manage one, and leave the other on the sink where it will remain, dried out and sad when I come back to my apartment hours (days? weeks?) later. Take out the other, toss it in the trash. Put my glasses back on. Pace, pace, pace. Talk to my cats, try to explain to the them with no words. Cry a little. Sit. Stand. You see, I am waiting for the police to come and take me to K's parent's house, because this is the morning that K has died. His brother's voice is echoing in my ear. My voice is echoing in my chest from having just gotten off the phone with my parents. Echoes all around. I am remembering this for you because it recently came flooding back to me.

Over the past year or so, K and I were fortunate to make two very good friends. A couple out of Chicago, who went to college with us. I'll call them the Travelers, because they've managed to see the world in a way most people in their late 20s/early 30s don't. We didn't know them so well in school, though K played basketball on occasion with Mr. Traveler. On the day of K's death, one of the first phone calls I made was to this couple. I'm not sure why, but it felt right. And that has pretty much been the name of the game ever since. So just recently I received a save the date from the Travelers, who will be married in a few months. And I was absolutely elated. But as I read the email, I teared up. And my high started to drift towards a low. You see, K and I would have attended together. And even more so, our friends are so very similar to us. Met at college, dated for many years afterwards, made a life together, finally getting married. Echoes all around. After the funeral, Mrs. Traveler sent me a message that relayed a similar idea. All our parallels. So my joy for them is the joy I would have had for myself, and my sorrow is the sorrow she could have had, in a different version of this life.

Another memory now: Dropped off at K's parent's house, there is an ambulance outside, and four or five police. The officer who dropped me, he says if I can be strong for the family, that would be best. He tells me K's mom is having a hard time. The ambulance is there for her, just in case, and regardless of that, I don't doubt the scene I will find inside. This is a mother who has lost her first born, after all. A hard time would be a massive understatement. But this officer, he doesn't know our history. He doesn't know that this is my husband who has died, that we were boyfriend and girlfriend in title only, but the heart is different. Time is different. But I have always had a strange sense of duty, a way of doing what's asked of me, somehow.

And so a few hours later, I find myself in K's parent's kitchen, surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins. Sitting on a wooden chair, trying to stay warm. It's cold and clear this day, but the cold is the kind that wraps around your heart and pulls on your organs, the clarity reminding you that you're still here. That I'm still here, when K is not. On any other day, had we been up early, I would have inhaled deeply and told K it was the kind of morning that made you feel life. But on this day, I cannot feel life with K; instead there is only the continuity from one moment to the next, each tip toeing further away from the last time I saw the love of my life alive.

And I'm sitting there, stoic. Strong for the family echoes in my short term memory. I've been carrying that particular echo for a while now, I think, these past few months. But that day especially, I held it well, that strength for the family. Phone calls and all that. And then suddenly, I am crying, because it just occurs to me how backwards all this is. And I'm telling his uncle and aunt how we were supposed to grow old together. I say that over and over, because that was my reality. I was never the kind of girl to plan her ideal wedding or any of that. But this was my life partner, my love, my spouse in my heart before God and the universe and all else, regardless of rings or papers or promises. And all of that is lost to me now.

And that's really what gets me down a lot of the time. Things are all out of order now. We had nine years together before K got snatched out of my life. Who knew old meant a few grey hairs as I entered my 30s, or that forever had a time limit? I am so excited to celebrate with The Travelers later this year, but when I dance, it won't be the way I would have danced with K. There is a certain joy in being that way you know, a natural rhythm that you have moving through space next to someone who fills your heart. I've thought a lot about the fairness of things, why some people get their partners and I do not get mine. I am intrinsically happy for anyone who finds love that way, but there are elements of jealousy too. I wouldn't be honest if I pretended I never felt it, and if there is one thing I won't do it is lie here in this place. Enough of those go on on to get us through the day, the lies we tell to keep us going, so let's have some truth, yeah?

Fuck 2014

I'm done with this year ya'll. I'm done with the universe picking off all our loved ones. People keep telling me it's the dying season. Fuck the dying season. Fuck reading a new status message every few days about yet another young person dying. Or someone's parent. Or someone's partner. I just...I can't.

Yesterday was the 2nd month anniversary of K's death. I still have a hard time typing that. Because every time I do, it makes it real. I don't know when I'll be able to type that, or say it, without feeling like if only I didn't say it, it wouldn't be true. I remember when we first started dating, I made us celebrate all of our month anniversaries. We'd been dating for a few weeks at the time, but made things official Nov 30th, 2004. So it was always the 30th of the month, until we hit one year. Now I wonder if I'm going to keep counting the months, until they become years. The 18th. The fucking 18th of every month for the next year. And then January 18th. November 30th. October 16th, his birthday. Those are the days that matter. Birth, love, death. All it boils down to in the end, made up out of 3 days each year my heart will catch a little.

I spend a lot of time wandering between remembering and forgetting. Forgetting the why and the how, but trying not to lose this beautiful person who I made so many memories with. For some reason, I remembered the first time K took me around people he knew as his girlfriend. It was this dance in his dorm, and he invited me. He wore a blue checked flannel shirt, black slacks and shiny black shoes. I remember how shiny his shoes were because of how well he danced. He was a great dancer. And I wore this spanish influenced black dress with red roses. And I remember at one point, he was spinning me, and salsa dancing, and all this other stuff while everyone else did the awkward two step with stiff arms on hips and shoulders. It was like a middle school dance where everyone was a little taller. K and I never two-stepped though, we always dance danced. And at one point, the Destiny's Child song Solider came on. And the whole room made a circle around us, dancing as we were. And every time the chorus would come on, they'd point at K. He was a little embarrassed, but also proud I think. It wasn't far into our relationship, but after that, I knew I loved him.

Through our relationship, I always felt that way, like he was my solider. Always there to protect me. And somehow, I couldn't return it. The only time it every actually mattered, I couldn't protect him.

Here's a poem I wrote, about how I've been feeling. About time and some other things. I'm trying to document these a little better, because sometimes poetry just feels so right.

I've been wondering about how time passes,
about long lines of possibility,
and the choices we make.
And how months feel like years and seconds
all at once somehow blurring by, 
tenuously. Everything so damn tenuous. 

I can't stop remembering the last time I saw you,
every second larger than
the life you left,
all in perfectly painted detail on my memory,
because time stopped then
--and my heart started beating broken--
and here I am,
monthssecondsyears passing me by,
still trying to understand how this is truth,
and what kind of cruelty exists that
our world takes you and leaves me, empty
and searching.

I'd be alright, if I could just see you.
I'll be alright, when time stops passing
lonely and broken like this.


Because I'm so over  2014, I've decided to publish this blog. I've had it secret for a little while, not sure what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to add some more entries maybe, make it feel more complete before I offered it up to the world. Opened myself up to everyone. But how can I sit on everything I'm going through, when so many people are sharing my experience? I want us all to heal by the commonality of the human experiences of Grief and Sorrow, not sit seemingly placid and quiet to the world while we break down inside. And lord knows I've been breaking down inside more and more. The outside though, that porcelain facade is on lock. Don't worry about me though, it's not a bad thing. I don't know how else I would get through my day. 

Love.

The Necessity of going to New Jersey

Tomorrow, I am going back to New Jersey for the first time in nearly a month. I went back immediately following my return from my parent's house, for a weekend. And since then, I haven't given much thought to going there. In fact, I could probably never go there again for the rest of my life. The whole state. I could just forget it exists...how many states? Not 49? Oh.

I'm going for work...I probably could have said I didn't want to go. I could have explained it, and they might have understood. I could be spending tomorrow safely in my little bubble, where people use subways and not cars, where K might still be alive if only he'd been willing to move out of NJ. I'm in danger of a panic attack. I'm in danger of breaking down into tears. I'm in danger of under performing due to the stress and anxiety of being only one small town away from the place I spent the past 5+ years of my life. But tomorrow, I'm going. I may not say anything until I have to. I may be as withdrawn as I can be without raising too many questions. But, I'm going.

I'm going because it's my job. Because life has to go on, has to function in a new normal. Because I'm stronger than my Grief, or my fear, or my heartache. Because I have to be. I don't think this will be good for me. I don't think it will be easy or okay, or that I will be able to start breathing again until I am safely back in the city, away from all the reminders. But I do think it's necessary. And that it why I'm going. Or at least what I keep telling myself, as I try to get to sleep tonight.